Australians work outside the New York label

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Michael Graeve waded through half a metre of snow when he
arrived in New York to take up an Australia Council-funded studio
residency five months ago.

But it was the burden of professional pressure that weighed more
heavily. After 10 years of carving out a niche in Australia with
his experiments in painting and sound, New York's teeming art world
was a leap into the unknown. He was anxious to make a dent.

The snow has long melted and Graeve has worked hard in his
temporary studio. His creative work was squeezed between three
other jobs in Melbourne; in New York he has revelled in the luxury
of total concentration. Now a sound installation and a group of his
paintings feature in Your Sky, an Australian group show
opening on Thursday hosted by a small but funky Tribeca gallery
ironically called Gigantic Artspace (GAS).

The gallery's director, Lea Rekow, is from Bundaberg and has
lived in New York for eight years. She opened the gallery in
December 2003 to represent multi-disciplinary artforms, rather than
"just putting paintings on the walls".

The gallery has just hosted a solo show for Edwina White, a
University of Technology, Sydney, graduate now living in Brooklyn.
Your Sky features six Australian artists who have worked, or
are working, in New York: Graeve and his wife Elissa Sadgrove,
Justine Cooper, Louisa Bufardeci, Jessica Rankin and Judith
Wright.

GAS's flurry of antipodean activity is a coincidence, says
Rekow. "I actually try to play down the Australian thing because to
me to identify someone by their nationality is really lame." In New
York, where everybody is from somewhere else, she says, "the whole
idea of promoting someone that way doesn't really hold water".

But she thinks Australian artists deserve as much support as
anyone else. Not that Australian art doesn't have a profile here -
indigenous contemporary art has been hot for some time.

Cooper, born in Sydney, has divided her life between Australia
and the US; her last move was to New York in 2000. In Australia,
she is known as a new media artist who experiments with medical
technology including magnetic resonance imaging.

The work in Your Sky involves more traditional
photography - she was the American Museum of Natural History's
first artist in residence, poking through backroom collections and
taking photos with a vintage camera to explore scientific desire
and why humans collect. "I could have looked in people's closets
and done the same kind of project," she says.

But had she done so she might not have found rows of stuffed
circus seals, lockers full of leopard pelts or trays of yellow
honeyeaters from Queensland. The leopards and birds were nearly
censored from her solo exhibition - the museum was concerned how
these macabre-looking specimens, relics of another era of
collecting, might reflect on the modern institution. Cooper argued
them back in.

She misses the openness of Australian institutions, so crucial
for the medical and scientific nature of her artwork. "In the
States it's so much more commercial. To get the same level of
access is really hard."

But what Cooper finds hardest is the pressure from the
commercial art world in New York "to do a particular kind of
thing". "They want you to be the artist who makes things out of
string or who only photographs animals," she says. Her next project
will focus on pharmaceutical marketing. "That makes me harder to
categorise."

For Graeve, it's been enough to attract some interest in New
York before he heads to Chicago on a scholarship. "I've only ever
had one curator studio visit in Australia over 10 years and I've
had maybe 30 or so in five months in New York."

While New York's international arts scene is undeniably more
influential than Melbourne's, Graeve says Australian arts funding
is better and there's more support from initiatives such as
artist-run spaces. Going home is not hard, he says; it's finding
the finances to maintain links in New York. He hopes Your
Sky leads to a relationship with GAS and a New York
connection.

But whatever happens, he says, "it's been a period of growth and
consolidation that will nourish".